It’s time to summarize what I’ve done during this year with Re:creation. It has been very good year, I’ve managed to do and learn lots of stuff.

Before I write about the stuff I’ve done I want to thank everyone who followed my progress and provided feedback. This stuff is really important for me and always keeps me motivated. With your support I never feel doubt about my game, I never want to stop making it. Thank you.

Special thanks to SFML community. It turned my dev log thread into a very cool discussion and helped me out with lots of stuff. This level of support is much more than I’ve ever expected and it’s very heartwarming.

I’ll show the most interesting stuff I’ve done and then explain some in more detail.
Some screenshots are taken at different parts of the year, so they may differ a lot!

Some gameplay gifs to get you started:

This one is my favorite gif so far. It really shows a lot of stuff I’ve made this year.

If you haven’t read the first part of the tutorial, I suggest you to read it, so you have a clear idea what’s going on. See the second part for the implementation details.

This article uses LuaBridge and if you’re not familiar with it, I suggest you to check out my tutorials about it. (Pt1, Pt2). If you’re using another Lua/C++ binding: that’s fine, you can totally implement everything I’m talking about with other bindings.

Intro

One of the coolest things in Lua is that you can call C++ functions from it. You can even register your own classes and call their member functions!

Suppose that you have a function which lets you get a component by its name.
What if you want to change animations in some Lua script? You can do it like this:

function someLuaFunction(entity)
...
local graphics = entity:getComponent("Graphics")
if(graphics) then
graphics:setAnimation("someAnimation")
end
...
end

I believe that this is not a greatest way to do things, because exposing components to Lua is not really necessary. Woudn’t it be nice to hide all the implementation details in C++? Here’s how the code above may look:

Almost five months passed since the last dev log on this blog.
Why? That’s because I created SFML forums thread and TIGSource thread and wrote most of the stuff about the game here! But I’ve realized that a monthly summary about what’s going on would be pretty helpful for those who don’t want to read long threads and search the most awesome stuff that’s been happening. Another plus is that I don’t have to write lots of in-depth style here. I will write in-depth stuff in SFML forums and TIGSource threads and link to those posts here, so you don’t have to scroll through stuff that you don’t want to read lots about.

Here’s the best screenshot I can show you at the moment to show where the things are right now.

Hello, this is a second part of “Using Lua with C++ in Practice” series. I recommend to read the first part to know what’s going on and why using Lua with C++ is awesome! (You’ll see it in this arcticle too, of course).

This tutorial will implement a simple ECS model which I’ll improve and use in other parts of tutorials. Note that this is not the best way to implement ECS. I’m making the most basic ECS which can be used to show the main principles of how things work in my game and how you can use them in general. This is not a tutorial about C++, so I won’t spend too much time discussing C++ parts and I’ll mostly focus on Lua/C++ interaction and binding. Let’s start!

There are many reasons to use Lua with C++. One of them is that you can put some of the logic from C++ code into scripts, so you can easily change them without the need or recompilation. You can also write some good interfaces, so the scripts are easy enough for even non-coders to write them. Lua is free, Lua is fast, Lua is used in game development quite often.

While there are plenty of good articles about using Lua with C++, I think there are not enough articles about how to use Lua in real projects.

This article is one of the many articles I plan to write. Here are some topics which my articles will cover:

Entity creation and other basic stuff (you’re reading this now)

How to implement entity creation

Managing Lua state and cleaning up

Scriptable state machines

Events and callbacks

The stuff described in the articles was mostly discovered during the development of my game called Re:creation.
I don’t think the methods here are perfect, but they’re good enough, fast and work well for me. So, your feedback is welcome. Feel free to leave comments and write e-mails to me about the stuff I can do better. I’m interested in hearing about your Lua/C++ usage!

While this is a C++ article, I think you can implement most of the things mentioned here in your favourite language. I’ll use Lua C API and LuaBridge for examples, so I recommend to read the following articles if you’re not familiar with them:

Last two months were pretty awesome. I had lots of free time and was able to implement lots of new stuff!

Recreation mechanic

Let’s start with a gameplay gif:

It’s another example of recreation mechanic.
For those who don’t know, recreation mechanic is the main mechanic in my game. When undead hero kills people, he can leave his body and control dead people with his ghost. He gains their abilities to progress through the game and solve various puzzles. But he can’t leave his body behind for a long time because he can’t carry the hammer while controlling other people. The hammer can do some stuff which normal weapons can’t. (break some floors, for example)
This hammer is very heavy so he can’t carry other weapons. So, for example, in order to shoot arrows, you need to kill archers and control them with your ghost.
He can also use his ghost to reach inaccessible areas. But this won’t be very useful if there are no corpses lying there because he won’t be able to interact with the world this way. But it has another use: you can look around and see what you have to deal with next. This will be very helpful when solving complex puzzles.